


Life Goes On

by scritch



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Friendship, Gen, Post-War, Recovery, Ron's POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-26
Updated: 2019-05-26
Packaged: 2020-03-17 21:28:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18973093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scritch/pseuds/scritch
Summary: Hermione cries, and he holds her at night. Harry cries, and he sits up with him in his mum’s kitchen and together they drink tea and talk about things like the Chudley Cannons, and dirty washing, and Honeydukes chocolate, and they don’t mention dying or war or anything like that.A snippet of Ron's life, post Battle of Hogwarts, and a look at recovery.





	Life Goes On

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr @[eiqhties](http://eiqhties.tumblr.com)

Life goes on, after the war, although for the first few days he thinks it won’t. He holds Hermione’s hand through the wreckage and they go ‘round Hogwarts and slot bricks back into place, pick up bodies and close their eyes to the horror of the rubble around them. Pick up bodies, and bring them to their families.

Hermione cries, and he holds her at night. Harry cries, and he sits up with him in his mum’s kitchen and together they drink tea and talk about things like the Chudley Cannons, and dirty washing, and Honeydukes chocolate, and they don’t mention dying or war or anything like that.

Together, all three of them go to Camden market and eat Indian burgers and chips.They go to the pub after, a muggle one, where people won’t look at them with pity and sadness and ask them about the war. And Harry will knock back a pint of beer, and Hermione will drink vodka-lemonade, and Ron sips at a lager and watches them both to make sure they don’t fall out of their seats, because he loves them, he loves them so much it feels like burning.

And life goes on.

Together, him and Harry, they find a flat in Perivale. It’s going cheap - because it’s not close to any kind of public transport links, and because the muggles can’t Floo or apparate - so Ron can pay enough of the rent that he doesn’t feel guilty. Harry still pays more, but Ron’s learned when to pick his battles now; Harry has money where Ron doesn’t, and so Ron lets him, and buys milk when he remembers and the two of them get by.

Harry lets him have the bigger bedroom, says he’ll need it for whenever Hermione gets the time to come visit from Hogwarts. Ron smiles at him, and doesn’t ask when Ginny will come to visit, because he’s seen the way that Harry goes white-knuckled when someone brings her up, like that. He doesn’t know what happened between the two of them, but doesn’t want to; they’re both his siblings, really, and it still hurts his head to think about them ever being together, like that, like he’s letting incest happen.

So, he tries not to bring it up. Tries not to bring up how much he misses Hermione, either, because he knows that won’t help. She’s re-doing seventh year, because of course she is, but McGonagall’s headmistress now and she’s letting students go home for the night when they want to. It makes sense. Everyone wants their loved ones close, now.

After the war.

He talks to George sometimes, when he can manage to hold himself together, seeing him like that, like he’s half full. He’d feel worse about it, if he thought that George was alone, properly alone, but Lee Jordan’s always with him, now. Talking loud enough that it almost fills the space that Fred used to take up.

And Ron looks at the way George leans against him, and wonders how he didn’t see it coming, his brother and Lee. He looks at the way Lee smiles in the corner of his mouth when he sees George, and wonders how he didn’t see a lot of it coming. When he leaves, Lee hugs him goodbye and George nods, with tired eyes, and Ron says, “ _I love you, mate_ ” as he apparates away.

Because if he can’t say it now, like this, when George is here and flesh and blood and breath in front of him, then when when can he say it? When he’s lowering him in the ground? When he’s standing by a gravestone that’s too dull and plain and - and, that’s not really a line of thought that he likes to go down.

So, he tells his brothers and Ginny that he loves them when he can, when he remembers, and they don’t call him a pansy, or a wet blanket like they once would have. Instead, they say it back, fierce. And life goes on.

“ _Life goes on_ ,” his mum says, as she mashes potatoes for tea, the muggle way, like she needs to hold everything herself to make sure it’s all there. Life goes on, and Ron doesn’t look at the way her hands shake, or the way that Bill only ever eats the meat on his plate, leaving all the veg. Life goes on, and Ron doesn’t look at the way Percy seems smaller every day, or the way that Charlie doesn’t seem to want to leave to go back to Romania. Life goes on, and Ginny owls him every day from Hogwarts, and his dad eats lunch with him in the ministry, and they’re all finding the ways they fit together again. Fit together with one less person amongst them.

And Harry tells him he doesn’t want to be an aurror anymore, doesn’t want to fight anymore. And Ron says, “Okay,” and slaps Harry on the shoulder. Because, what else is there to say, really? Other than _okay_ , other than, _life goes on_ , other than _you’re my brother and I love you_.

And Ron thinks about it for a bit, about whether he’s done fighting. Except there’s a restless energy in his bones, and he’s still so fucking angry at the things that were taken from him. He tells Hermione he doesn’t think he can rest until all the Death Eaters are gone, and Hermione pushes his hair behind his eyes and tells him that if anyone can do it, he can.

So he goes to the ministry alone, and Shacklebolt gives him the job right off the bat and says there’s nothing they could train him in that he hasn’t already lived through.

Ron starts working with Dean Thomas as a partner. It feels like it should be weird, that, but it isn’t, because Dean is stable and more okay than most people Ron spends his time around, now. He tells him about Seamus, and Parvati, and the way that Seamus still can’t cook without setting their kitchen on fire, in the little flat they have in Enfield, and together they ‘round up the last of the Death Eaters with a grim determination.

And life goes on.

He comes home on a Thursday, his robes are dirty and he’s tired, and it was a bad day in the office. Dean had taken a hex to the shoulder, and though he’s okay, getting seen to in St Mungoes by Hannah Abott, the whole ordeal made Ron feel like he was going to throw up.  
He’s tired, and all he wants is leftover curry and a cup of tea and to floo Hermione and have her tell him some facts about dentistry, or how to make jam, or something equally unrelated to wizards and war and magic.

He finds Harry, sitting on the sofa that they picked up from a Muggle shop, looking down at a photograph with watery eyes and he knows, he already knows, that this is going to be one of those moments that changes something big in his head.

So he grabs his leftover jalfrezi, sits down beside Harry, and says, “What is it?”

And Harry shows him the photograph with shaking hands, and Ron looks down at it and feels the bottom drop out of his stomach. It’s Lupin and Sirius, except they’re young and unblemished, they don’t look old and skinny and half broken. In the picture, Lupin’s hair curls so much it’s basically in ringlets, and Sirius looks filled out and handsome.

In the picture, both Lupin and Sirius are sat on some grass, with their backs to the trunk of a tree. Neither one of them is paying any attention to the person taking the photograph, each one far too focused on the other.

And Sirius has his hands in Lupin’s hair, and Lupin’s smiling in a way that Ron never saw him do when he was alive - not once in the four years he knew him. This look, that’s big and open and _young_. This look, that predates war, predates loss, predates the ruin of both of their lives.

And, as Ron watches, they both sway into each other, and Sirius in the photo presses messy kisses all over Lupin’s nose, and eyes, and cheeks.

Ron puts the photo down, feels his heart pound, and says, “Blimey.”

“They were in love,” Harry says, and his voice sounds reed thin, worn out. “They were in love, but -” Harry breaks off, voice cracking, and Ron takes pity on him, loops an arm over his best friend’s shoulders and pulls him in close.

They were in love, he thinks, and yet they stopped trusting each other. They were in love, but Remus went twelve years believing that Sirius killed his best friends. They were in love, but Sirius lost so much faith in that he gave the Potter’s secret to someone else. They were in love, but they stopped trusting each other, and then they stopped trusting themselves.

Ron looks at Harry, thinks about how much he loves him, thinks about how he’d give his life for him, tries to imagine what would need to happen for that to change. He thinks about Hermione, about the way she looks when she’s asleep, about the curve of her eyelashes against her cheek, the smell of her shampoo. He thinks about what would have to happen for that feeling to go away, for the feeling of paranoia to overtake it.

It feels almost impossible. And yet.

And yet -

Ron thinks of how his earliest memory is Percy, picking him up after Fred pushed him over. He thinks of how Percy washed his sore hands, and said, “ _Shh, shh,_ ” Just like their mum used to. Percy, all of eight years old, holding Ron closer and saying, “I won’t let them hurt you anymore.”

He thinks of Percy storming out of the Burrow at Christmas, their mum crying in his wake. The way the twin’s faces went dark, and twisted. He thinks of war, of leaving Harry and Hermione behind. Of those weeks and weeks on his own, all of the worst possible thoughts bouncing ‘round his head.

He thinks of Sirius and Lupin and what you have to see to stop believing in the people you love, and he knows it’s not much more than what he saw, himself.

“I just keep thinking,” Harry says, muffled by Ron’s shoulder, “I just keep thinking about what if.”

What if Sirius hadn’t swapped with Peter? What if Remus had believed Sirius wasn’t capable of that kind of cruelty? What if James and Lily Potter had lived, and Voldemort had been around those eleven years. Would the Order have won? Would Ron have become the person he is? Would Harry? Would Hermione have been allowed into Hogwarts?

Ron shakes his head, pulls Harry in closer and says, “Mate, what if I’d never spent second year vomiting slugs? What if I’d not broken my ankle going down the Shack in third year, and you and Hermione had told me what you’d got up to? What if I didn’t spend fourth year pissed off at you?”

Harry blinks at him, “That’s different.”

Ron shrugs, “It’s still a what if, isn’t it? Like, what if they’d got more than George’s ear? What if Moody hadn’t died? What if I never made it back and you got stuck in that lake and Hermione waited in that tent for hours before she realised what had happened?”

Harry sucks a breath in through his teeth, and Ron feels a little bad, that he’s bringing all this up. A little dizzy that he’s even saying it all out loud, that they’re talking about these things at all. But. But - “We can think of all the good and bad things we could have done, or should have done, but we can’t bloody change them, can we?”

Harry laughs, a little, just a tiny huff of air out and Ron feels like he’s won. “That was almost wise, Ron,” He says, and Ron smiles back at him.

“It’s all the time I’ve been spending with Hermione, lately,” He says, and Harry laughs properly then, and the air lifts slightly.

And Sirius and Lupin might have been in love, and they might have got it wrong, and they might have hurt themselves, and others in the process, but they got it wrong so that Harry and Ron could sit here, in Perivale, in a passable two bedroom flat. They got it wrong, so that Lee can hold George’s hand in the middle of the street, so that Hermione’s parents can move back to their house in Slough.

They got it wrong so that Ron can tell his siblings he loves them, practise holding his temper, eat curry with Harry and learn to cook scrambled eggs the muggle way with his dad, so he can take Hermione out to the Jamaican restaurant she likes.

They got it wrong, but life goes on.

Life goes on.

**Author's Note:**

> In an almost desperate bid to forget that I am growing older and finishing university soon, I've found myself back in the throes of the Harry Potter fandom. Ron was always my favourite character as a kid, and I really, really hate the way that he was handled in fandom/in the film universe, so this is just me trying to fix that a little. We don't all stay stuck in the personality that we had at fourteen. Especially not after fighting a war. Anyway... 
> 
> Some notes on my own personal head-canons for the futures of these characters (JKR's epilogue and the Cursed Child absolutely do not exist in my timeline.):  
> \- McGonagall: headmistress for a long time after, she understands that people are nervous about letting their children board in a post-war society, and that people want their families close. So, the floo networks in Hogwarts are always open and people can go home as often as they want. Most students choose to stay boarding, but go home on weekends.  
> \- Harry: becomes a DADA teacher in Hogwarts. When he's not in the castle over summer, he lives with Neville in a top floor flat in West Kensington with a patio. Neville covers the whole patio in plants, Harry spends half the summer accidentally killing them.  
> \- Ron: eventually Kingsley makes him head aurror, saying his head for strategy and his diplomatic approach to delegating roles make him the perfect candidate for the job. With his new wages, Hermione and Ron get a little house in Richmond because it's a good place to raise children, they have a son and a daughter.  
> \- Hermione: becomes the Minister for Magic, and introduces anti-discriminatory laws against muggle-borns, half bloods and house elves.  
> \- Bill: happily married to Fleur  
> \- Charlie: goes back to Romania, but visits home a lot more often.  
> \- Percy: tries to work in the ministry for a couple of years, but is too disullusioned with government - even though he knows it's better now. He retrains as a healer in St Mungoes, specialising in children.  
> \- George: starts working in Weasley's Wizard Wheezes again, and marries Lee in Autumn, Ron and Ginny cry at the wedding.  
> \- Ginny: captain of the Holyhead Harpies and moves into a house in the Brecon Beacons with Luna, they get engaged but never married - much to Molly's annoyance. Ginny is the only one who doesn't stay near London / in South England
> 
> Harry frames the photo of Remus and Sirius next to one of his mum and dad.


End file.
